Tag Archives: Adaptable

Re-making is a process of redefinition: an opportunity to explore possibilities that were previously untapped.
In my redefinition of my previous housing project, I reiterated the concept of wall habitation and thread on three scales: the inhabitant, the apartment, and the building as a whole.
Living minimally in New York City is a challenge for housing design. The problem inspired me to reimagine the wall not only as something which defines the space we inhabit, but also as something with the potential to contain, extend, and express living space.
The program is defined around habitation requirements of light/air, storage, and resting. The wall becomes the canvas in which these three living necessities are programmatically delineated. The thinning and thickening of the wall creates pocket-spaces within which the kitchen and bathroom are contained.
As inhabitants move through the space and use interior walls to access different programmatic functions, the exterior wall shifts to accommodate these uses. The exterior wall is thus a dynamic body which transfers, projects, and imprints all living activities from inside to outside, resulting in a symbiotic relationship between wall and program.

The basis of the project is adaptation and an imprinting of information onto surfaces. After the analysis of moveable, adaptable surfaces and surface complexities which create depth on a semi-flat surface, my ephemeral surface was created.
Its language is a translation of the occupants’ dialogue with the interior, which is projected outward. The street-front facade is alive to the rhythm and needs of the inhabitants. Its language is a result of light allowance, storage, resting, and space separation. The program’s organization provides the foundations for how the dialogue is translated. The translated usage is enigmatic to those outside. However, it is grasped only from within, by its users that create the esoteric text of the transitory narrative of habitation.

This piece is designed with mobility and storage, adapting to the user’s needs. The table can be easily assembled and disassembled with removable legs. Chairs fold into a single frame, and can be stored into slots within the table legs. The table top’s longer edges slide open to extend its surface.

The scenario of a bachelor living in a small studio apartment in the East Village of New York City was the premise and inspiration for this table. The design is a reaction to the limited space in the apartment. Its features include two pocket sleeve drawers on opposite sides, spaces within the table tops for storage, and rotating table tops that allow for an extension of the surface to adapt to the user’s needs.

Once the sole purview of the profession of civil engineering, infrastructure- which includes the management of water, waste, food, transport, and energy- is taking on extreme relevance for landscape planning and design practices in the context of changing, decentralizing structures of urban-regional economies. Food production and energy networks can no longer be engineered without considering the cascade of waste streams in the cycling of raw material inputs…Put simply, the urban-regional landscape should be conceived as infrastructure.

All forms of waste are eventually consumed, used, and recycled in a chain of matter and energy flow. But humans have persistently mismanaged their waste, creating new types at an increasing pace and in excessive quantities without establishing recovery mechanisms that enable their flow and circulation back into the cultural / natural systems…[waste] is a link in the continuous flow of matter and energy.

Engineering systems are designed from the inside outward, that is, from components into a functioning whole. Behavior of a system is a consequence of interaction of its parts, parts that themselves must be understood and interconnected.